Recently surpassing 110 million active monthly users, now proliferated to the UK, Australia and eight other international markets, and poised for vast additional expansion once its parent company’s $22 billion proposed purchase of rival Roku closes, free streaming service Tubi is touting its first-ever global marketing campaign.
You can almost feel prototypical Mad Men adman himself, Don Draper, standing in front of his Kodak Carousel, making the pitch: “Find Any Feeling For Free.”
To make its campaign, Tubi worked with a real-life New York creative agency, Mischief @ No Fixed Address, to produce a series of humorous TV commercials aimed at the free, ad-supported streamer’s target audience.
With streaming video consumers complaining more and more about how difficult and time-consuming it is to find something they want to watch, Tubi is trying to convey the message that it’s the one that delivers on the emotional, experiential simplicity its Gen-Z core demographic is known to covet.
In the 30-second spot titled “Childhood,” for example, we see a 20-something women looking nostalgic while laying in a kid’s bed.
“You could have a nostalgic moment sleeping in your childhood room,” the narrator says, as the viewer also hears the family who currently owns the home return to it, while the young woman slips out the bedroom window.
We next see her streaming video on her smart phone in the nearby treehouse. “Or you could feel nostalgic watching cartoons on Tubi,” the narrator says.
The legitimately funny spot finishes with a young boy, yelling from the bedroom the woman was just in, “Mom, some lady’s shoes are in my room!”
In “Fakin’ It,” we see a young woman playing dead at her own open-casket funeral while being thoughtfully eulogized … until she breaks character and sits up, sending her disgusted friends, co-workers and family members headed for the door of the church.
The narrator reminds us that we don’t need to fake our own death to feel love. We could also achieve this emotion by watching heart-warming movies on Tubi.
The campaign also features a “TubiFone" ad. By calling 1-833-605-TUBI, users will be greeted with a baritone voice, one maybe not so familiar to Gen-Z, but certainly recognizable to us who were around for the once mega-popular 1980s-era Moviefone local cinema guide. TubiFone asks callers to make selections based on how their feeling. It then renders actual movie suggestions from Tubi’s vast programming library.
It’s a clever workaround in an era in which streaming search and discovery, despite AI-infused augmentation, is still a pain point for many users. The fact that it lets Tubi gather some coveted user data is also certainly a plus.
"We are in an era of yearning, where people are looking for experiences that make them feel alive, whether that is through awe, fear, desire, joy or catharsis,” said Nicole Parlapiano, CMO at Tubi, in a statement. “What we choose to watch is deeply personal and is often driven by what we want to feel next. 'Find Any Feeling For Free' taps into that very human impulse and gives people an emotional reason to turn to Tubi."
The campaign is certainly on-brand for Tubi.
While many big premium subscription streaming companies have struggled with brand identity, particularly in an era in which so much content is aggregated on platforms like Amazon Prime Video, brand marketing has remained a core strength for Tubi.
For the 2023 Super Bowl, for instance, Tubi introduced its first big national TV ad campaign, featuring creepy, oversized bunnies dragging off unsuspecting Gen-Z denizens and throwing them down big holes in the ground.
The strange campaign was meant to emphasize Tubi’s ability to personalize its experience around individual users.
While paid services like Netflix and Disney+ spend billions of dollars on original content trying to lure mass audiences, Tubi leaned into the supposed “death of the monoculture” — on an audience plane no longer merely fragmented but atomized, Tubi viewers could dive into their own personal “rabbit holes” by simply using the platform’s vast licensed collection of archived movie and TV titles.
Certainly, it’s been a strategy and a message that has worked for Tubi.
These are heady times for streamer. Purchased by Fox Corp. and the Murdochs for $440 million back in 2020 — an absolute bargain, in retrospect — the small streaming division has become a centerpiece of the media conglomerate’s ongoing business plan. The unit generated nearly $1.1 billion in 2025.
The Fox/Roku merger looks to be a true game-changer for Tubi, combining the two largest FAST platforms which, together according to Nielsen, control more than 5% of all U.S. TV watching. And this is before the synergies of combining two platforms’ robust libraries are considered, not to mention the control of having it all on the Roku TVOS, the most popular streaming gateway in North America.
That said, given what has been long assumed to be strong alignment between Fox’s controlling shareholders, Rupert and James Murdoch, and the Trump administration, many in the media business were surprised this week when the Department of Justice made a second request to Fox and Roku for information regarding their deal — a move that seems to convey concern about anti-trust issues.
Separately, but perhaps related, White House officials reportedly reached out to Fox executives last week to express their dismay regarding the firing of former Fox Business presenter Maria Bartiromo.